Distributed services are a common feature of modern computer networks. Often, to provide efficient allocation of processing resources, functionality needed by one or more computers or other components on the network is provided by a single computer for use by all the computers and components on the network. Traditionally, the services available have been bound to specific machines and often to specific ports on those specific machines.
However, network traffic, power outages, component failures, and a host of other impediments can prevent a computer from being able to access services being provided by another computer on the network. Thus, achieving a minimum degree of system reliability often requires redundant instances of a particular service be available on the network distributed across multiple machines. This results in an inefficient/allocation of network resources.